87 research outputs found

    “The Dignity of Being Called Americans”: American Identity and Portrayals of Canadians in the American Press, 1754-1812

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    This dissertation explores the ways that Canadians were portrayed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American press and considers how those portrayals intersected with and reinforced the development of early American identity. Building on the concepts of “othering” as identified by Edward Said and “imagined communities” as identified by Benedict Anderson, I argue that American newspapers othered Canadians as a means of reinforcing cohesion within the early American imagined community. Many historians have explored the ways that early Americans othered their French, British, Indigenous, and Black neighbours in constructing their own unified American identity, but these studies have not explored the role that the othering of Canadians also played in this process. Canadians mattered to Americans because they served as an ideal foil, or negative example, against which to define the American identity. As North American subjects of European colonial empires, Canadians were more American than Europeans, yet more European than Americans. The Canadians’ origins were also diverse, including French, English, American, and Indigenous peoples, and so provided many different national and racial foils against which to compare White Americans. Positive comparisons emphasized the shared qualities American newspapers felt were properly American, while the much more numerous negative comparisons highlighted the aspects of American identity that made it superior to its northern neighbour. Though portrayals of Canadians oscillated between positive peaks and negative valleys throughout the period between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812, the majority of depictions were negative, and remained consistently so throughout the era. This dissertation traces the origins of these negative portrayals back to the French and Indian War, and argues that the methods that American newspapers used to paint the Canadians as an enemy other pioneered many of the approaches that were later utilized during the Revolution and the War of 1812. Canada has often been an afterthought for modern Americans, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Canada mattered to Americans greatly. In their depictions of Canadians, early Americans often defined their emerging identity against what it was not: not British, not Indigenous, and not Canadian

    Digital Literacies

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    With our increasing use of digital and online media, the way we interact with these forms of communication is having an enormous impact on our literacy and learning. In Digital Literacies, Julia Gillen argues that to a substantial extent Linguistics has failed to rise to the opportunities presented by studying language in digital contexts. Assuming no existing knowledge, and drawing from a wide range of research projects, she presents a range of approaches to the study of writing and reading language online. Challenging some of the existing concepts, Digital Literacies traces key ideas through both the history of literacy studies and contemporary approaches to language online, including linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics. Examples, taken from real life studies, include the use of digital technologies in everyday life, online teenage communities and professional use of Twitter in journalism. Within each chapter, the relevant research methods used are explored and then tied to the theory underpinning them. This book is an innovative and essential read for all those studying and researching applied linguistics, particularly in the areas of literacy and multimodality, at an upper undergraduate and postgraduate level. The title will also be of interest to those working with new media in the fields of Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Psychology, and Education

    Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health

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    Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers the century when infectious plagues—anthrax, tuberculosis, tetanus, plague, smallpox, and polio—were conquered, and details the important role that veterinary scientists played. The narrative is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in the 1880s, conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, German anthrax attacks on the United States during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and today’s bioterror dangers. Veterinary science in the rural Midwest arose from agriculture, but in urban Philadelphia it came from medicine; similar differences occurred in Canada between Toronto and Montreal. As land-grant colleges were established after the American Civil War, individual states followed divergent pathways in supporting veterinary science. Some employed a trade school curriculum that taught agriculturalists to empirically treat animal diseases and others emphasized a curriculum tied to science. This pattern continued for a century, but today some institutions have moved back to the trade school philosophy. Avoiding lessons of the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education reform, university-associated veterinary schools are being approved that do not have control of their own veterinary hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and research institutes—components that are critical for training students in science. Underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture—disbelief in science and distrust of government—that spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, and other anti-science scams. As new infectious plagues continue to arise, Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues details the strategies we learned defeating plagues from 1860 to 1960—and the essential role veterinary science played. To defeat the plagues of today it is essential we avoid the digital cocoon of disbelief in science and cultural stasis now threatening progress.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/1059/thumbnail.jp

    Telling the Stories, Branding the Land: Examining Regional Narratives and Texts in Northern Alberta

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    This ecocritical study analyzes literary works and narratives related to northern Alberta. It establishes correlations between the way the land, history, and culture have been represented in these buried texts and the master narrative of resource development that continues to dominate this highly contested region. Using an interdisciplinary approach to this understudied content, this investigation combines rhetorical and discourse analysis with ecocritical close readings. The dissertation initially explores recurring themes in northern Alberta’s literature and then examines specific narratives concerning three men who have remained popular in the region: A.M. Bezanson, “Twelve Foot” Davis, and “Peace River Jim” Cornwall. While their legacies have endured, the thesis addresses the fact that other important texts that were written by women – such as Mary Lawrence, Katherine Hughes, Dorothy Dahlgren, and Alvena Strasbourg – have become scarce and obscure. After comparing the gendered perspectives contained in these texts, the discussion turns to authors who have been affiliated with fossil fuel development, including petroleum pioneer Sidney Ells, investigative trailblazer Larry Pratt, and industry ally J. Joseph Fitzgerald, who each helped rhetorically define, confront, or embrace local infrastructure projects. Next there is an analysis of three novels that engage with stock genres in order to present their stories, including a northern Alberta-based thriller written in 1980 by best-selling author Alistair MacLean. The thesis concludes by examining two influential local newspaper editors who, through their popular books, became self-appointed gatekeepers of the region’s voices. This example of authorial control over northern Alberta’s published texts speaks to an urgent need to recover, reproduce, and republicize neglected local stories and texts in order to challenge broader hegemonic forces and to better understand this region and its people. This dissertation intervenes to offer a critical starting point in recognizing, reading, and disseminating these vital voices now and in the future

    Auld Lang Syne:A Song and its Culture

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    In Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, M. J. Grant explores the history of this iconic song, demonstrating how its association with ideas of fellowship, friendship and sociality has enabled it to become so significant for such a wide range of individuals and communities around the world. This engaging study traces different stages in the journey of Auld Lang Syne, from the precursors to the song made famous by Robert Burns to the traditions and rituals that emerged around the song in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including its use as a song of parting, and as a song of New Year. Grant’s painstaking study investigates the origins of these varied traditions, and their impact on the transmission of the song right up to the present day. Grant uses Auld Lang Syne to explore the importance of songs and singing for group identity, arguing that it is the active practice of singing the song in group contexts that has made it so significant for so many. The book offers fascinating insights into the ways that Auld Lang Syne has been received, reused and remixed around the world, concluding with a chapter on more recent versions of the song back in Scotland. This highly original and accessible work will be of great interest to non-expert readers as well as scholars and students of musicology, cultural and social history, social anthropology and Scottish studies. The book contains a wealth of illustrations and includes links to many more, including manuscript sources. Audio examples are included for many of the musical examples. Grant’s extensive bibliography will moreover ease future referencing of the many sources consulted

    Down the garden-path and back again: Factors contributing to successful recovery from ambiguity-related misinterpretations

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    For most adults, understanding the meaning of words and sentences seems like an easy task. However, misinterpretations are common. More than 80% of common English words have more than one meaning – even the word “abstract” is ambiguous. The pervasiveness of ambiguity means that selecting appropriate word meanings is a fundamental skill for readers. But what happens when the language processing system selects the wrong meaning? Sentences like “The plant had been difficult to build” lead readers down a metaphorical “garden path” in interpretation: because they are likely to initially select the meaning of “plant” that first comes to mind (“botanical organism”), readers need to initiate appropriate reinterpretation processes once they realise that this meaning is not compatible with “build”. This thesis addresses two gaps in the literature on the recovery from such misinterpretations: Are the processing costs that comprehenders experience when they need to reinterpret a sentence consistent across a) tasks or stimulus presentation formats with different processing demands, and b) individuals? Results from the present thesis revealed that readers initiated reinterpretation procedures at an earlier point during processing when an explicit task required them to understand the sentence in detail (Chapter 4). Additionally, reinterpretation costs to brain responses were found to be exaggerated in a visual word-by-word presentation format compared with listening or whole-sentence reading (Chapter 5). Individual differences investigations showed that readers with greater vocabulary knowledge tended to be more sensitive to errors in processing, and able to adapt their reading behaviour on-line (Chapters 2 and 3). These findings support theories that view language experience and the development of robust knowledge structures as central to language processing, and highlight the importance for both theorists and experimentalists to carefully consider the influence of task-related and format-related processing demands on processing behaviour and comprehension

    Feminism for Sale: Commodity Feminism, Femininity, and Subjectivity

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    Today it is commonplace for the female consumer to be targeted using appropriated feminist discourses. This dissertation theorizes commodity feminism, a play on Marxs conception of commodity fetishism, at the intersections of Marx/Marxism, feminist theory, and Freud/Freudianism. My method involves exploring a series of relationships through reading canonical and contemporary works of political theory and feminist theory. These relationships build upon one another in each chapter: the first relationship is between women and commodities, and to this relationship I add femininity, social control, and subject formation in sequence. In thinking through these relationships, I critique a variety of trade and scholarly marketing publications and marketing campaigns. I argue that the theory of commodity feminism provides a crucial, and as of yet unearthed, understanding of the contemporary relationship between women and commodities. I define commodity feminism as the commodification of feminist critique and praxis. In its cultural sense, commodity feminism is the broad phenomenon in which women are encouraged to express their empowerment by purchasing commodities. The politics of commodity feminism are both liberal and conservative. Commodity feminism is liberal in that it offers a type of resolution (however commodified) to the feminism/femininity tension and endorses liberal feminist politics of independence and self-determination. However, I argue that the view of society underpinning commodity feminism is conservative in that the masses are understood to be a problem in need of control. Therefore, commodity feminism, in addition to resolving the feminism/femininity tension by revaluing feminized commodities and the women who use them, transforms commodities into a form of social control. In other words, commodity feminism makes women entirely unthreatening to the status quo, yet allows them to feel like feminists through their consumption of feminized commodities and production of femininity. This social control is accomplished in part through the role played by commodities and corporations in the production of subjectivity. As this dissertation shows, commodity feminism today constitutes several hegemonic feminine/feminist subjectivities in the Global North and increasingly the Global South

    Footsteps through sacred heart college: surfacing archival heritage through walking and mapping

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    Submitted in part fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts by Coursework and Research Report University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg 2017MT 201
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